After almost 24 months of constant development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 8 (code name Jessie), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and of the Debian Long Term Support team.

Jessie ships with a new default init system, systemd. The systemd suite provides many exciting features such as faster boot times, cgroups for services, and the possibility of isolating part of the services. The sysvinit init system is still available in Jessie.

that the majority of Linux users seem to think that Ubuntu (or its stablemates) is LINUX and the only Linux Distro.
The Linux mags seem to focus on the distro at the expense of all others. Debian, SUSE and RH distros seem to have been relegated to 'lip service' roles.

It also seems to me that Canonical is deliberatly removing its dependency on Debian. How that will work out in the long run I don't know,

Well done to the Debian team for this release. I have a couple of servers running Debian that I upgraded over the weekend.(My main servers run CentOS)

Consider this: With the official Wheezy and Jessie Live images, I don't have any kind of network connectivity at all on my laptop because the necessary packages (firmware-realtek for Ethernet and firmware-iwlwifi for WLAN) are not included. I know how to modify the squashfs to add them, but I don't have to do anything with the official Ubuntu images to get proper network connectivity (both Ethernet and WLAN).

I can't comment on the other distros simply because I haven't touched them in years.